Why actions speak louder

You don't need a strategically placed microphone to help you feel queasy about live cosmetic surgery. And planting one in front of the Brighton bomber didn't aid our understanding of that attack either

Why actions speak louder

You don't need a strategically placed microphone to help you feel queasy about live cosmetic surgery. And planting one in front of the Brighton bomber didn't aid our understanding of that attack either

The cameras, if not the microphones, now get everywhere. Wincingly so: in Cosmetic Surgery Live - and you and your breakfast will be delighted to learn I'm going to tell you more about this later as soon as my lower intestine snakes itself back to rights - it was thrilling to learn how far the cameras had managed to go. They had found, apparently, a thoroughly illegal whale-cull on Pluto. It was only mildly disappointing, in the end, to learn that the cameras had been inside the buttocks of a man who looked like a ferret and was paying for plastic things to be inserted bloodily into his bottom, live, in front of a camera crew and Vanessa Feltz. For all that, this was still, and I mean this quite honestly, as intriguing a comment on the cosmos as learning that the cameras had been filming the awful Pluto whale scandal.

But the microphones let us down for most of this week. They didn't, for instance, record, or at least not loudly enough, the sniggers of the crew as they filmed ferret-boy's operation. They didn't record what was being said by the shirtsleeved cop sent onto the Palace balcony to chat to Batman for five hours. What do you say ? The gruff cop-talk - come on, sir, what would happen if we all did what we liked - is going to run out. Football. Hols. The funny patterns in the Tarmac below. Did they, by the end, solve the hidden mysteries of life itself, or were they just snickering at what they'd like to do to that Zara given half a chance? We didn't find out. Just as we didn't find out what the posh bumpkins who invaded the Commons chamber were shouting, although perhaps that's in the end for the best ('Help me! I'm rich, angry and pointless, and my father's Bryan Ferry!').

Nor do we ever find out, exactly, what the Iraqis are yelling after the bombs. I sometimes wish all the advances of television would by now have presented us with the simple gift of tongues: press red to translate. 'Mother of Satan,' they are screaming, or some such. 'My son's life is over. I can never feel love again, or joy, or wind... what are you doing to life, you mad bastards, all of you?' Instead we get brave British reporters on all channels with a slightly downcast 'Yes, as you can see, not a little anger and, well, even grief, after this, the latest...' and I'm not sure if it's quite the same.

And then, midweek, the microphones worked and there came an astounding voice from the shadows, one we had though we would never hear: Patrick Magee, The Brighton Bomber, talking about bombing Brighton.

The first of Peter Taylor's films on the IRA attack which killed five in the Grand Hotel during the 1984 Tory conference was about the explosion and the rescues; the second, The Hunt for the Bomber, an unprecedented interview with Magee, released in 1999 after serving 13 years. Magee spends much of his time now working with Jo Berry, a wise soul whose father was killed by the bomb, for a charity to promote understanding between the perpetrators and victims of crime: he talks most days to the daughter of the man he killed. He must wish, today, he hadn't agreed to talk to Peter Taylor.

Both films were infuriatingly disappointing. Taylor's meticulous research, and the persuasion needed to get so many of those involved - primarily Magee - on screen, should have resulted in vital documentaries which lifted veils on the mindset of terrorism. Instead, we got a skewed history lesson which could have been scripted by a Home Counties head some time during the early Seventies, at the height of Britain's culpable ignorance of Ulster.

There was some fine testimony in the first film. Never mind your political sympathies: it would have been very hard, unless you'd spent those years hauling lashed-up petards of farm stump dynamite between backyards in Belfast, not to be moved by the quiet eloquence of Margaret Tebbit, the self-deprecation of the firemen, even the slices of high-Tory stoicism, pompous to the extreme in all circum stances other than these. But Taylor ladled it on too much. 'Kipling would have been proud of her,' came one quote, about Margaret Thatcher. 'Fresh as a daisy, she was.' 'No wonder they call her the Iron Lady.' Danny Morrison, the lone Sinn Fein voice allowed on to attempt to explain the IRA's murderous hatred, was interrupted at one point by Taylor while trying, patiently, to explain why they so reviled the woman. 'But...' barked our supposedly impartial film-maker... 'but she gave a resounding speech about democracy...'

It all grew even worse with the filming of Magee, a quiet and obviously fiercely intelligent man doing his best to explain, slowly, why he thought for so many years that he had to murder people.

'Did you see Norman Tebbit, being rescued from the rubble?' asked Taylor of Magee towards the end, his voice slow and sonorous, rich with the expectation of a sudden on-camera recantation, and I hate to say it but I was glad when the little man in the beard and glasses half-smiled and introduced some dry reality. 'Well, yes, but I have to tell you quite honestly that at that time I wouldn't have lost much sleep over Norman Tebbit...'

Of course he wouldn't. Tebbit and his colleagues were the bloody enemy ; Magee had tried to murder him, and it might have been worthwhile, given the chance of this rare interview, trying to find out why. Both Magee and Morrison were allowed brief snippets to begin explaining why they did, in all honesty, feel engaged in a war, and saw the Tory party, and its supporters at conference, as legitimate targets, but the issue was never further explored. It would, surely, have been useful to know how the IRA was categorising 'legitimates' and 'innocents', and into which suit wives fell. And, if Magee and Morrison did feel they were engaged in a legitimate war, it would have been highly instructive to learn why the IRA has made such a fuss of events such as Gibraltar, rather than seeing them simply as combat deaths.

In the end, we were left with Taylor crying 'Repent!' to a man trying patiently and in vain to explain the subtle difference between regret and repentance. Younger viewers, sadly, will have been left with little or no understanding of the political context of the attacks: this retrospective accorded the high Tories, presiding at the height of the Troubles, the same bewildered-innocent status of the victims of, say, the Twin Towers.

It was, surely, necessary to touch on the depths to which that party was so reviled by so much of the country at that time, five turbulent years into the Thatcher experiment; in 1984, it wasn't just paid-up members of the Provisionals who were sketching quiet smiles at the footage. Grim this may sound but that doesn't make it any the less true: I was in a pub in Dundee the evening after the bomb, and knew lawyers and bandits and councillors and coppers who were punching the air that night as they watched the television; with glee, and with a mild disappointment at the body-count.

One week on, I'm still thinking sweet thoughts about Belonging, a drama that left you feeling strangely upbeat despite its themes of lost love, loneliness and living deaths. Rosemary Harris gave us one of the most malevolent but vulnerable old bats ever committed to screen, and Brenda Blethyn's unconscionably fine portrayal of a truly good Christian - the type who doesn't even go to church but just gets on with life with forgiveness and tolerance and, crucially, humour - managed, remarkably, to come close to giving religion something of a good name. And the integrity and guts ITV showed in running this - hardly a face under 50, not a thong in sight - in such a prime slot... it felt like the sun coming out.

Early Doors, which began its second run, is a faithful evocation of what it's like to stand eavesdropping while sipping a pint in a dingy pub for half an hour of a quiet Monday night. There is occasional wry wit, and long pauses. This is fine, but confuses me: if I want to faithfully evoke the feeling of eavesdropping in a dingy pub of a quiet Monday night, sipping a pint, I have a cunning other way of doing it.

Gloriously worth switching on when back from the pub was Cosmetic Surgery Live , and three cheers to C5 for its continuing brazenness, and delightful lack of hypocrisy. There's not the tiniest pretence at education, exploration or any interest other than pure voyeurism, even if it's watched between shaking fingers. Yellow subcutaneous fat explodes over the screen like cheap foam stuffing: calves and breasts and buttocks swell and pop and run with blood, and we get to see anal bleaching (If you gotta ask, lady, you'll never know). Best of all, Vanessa invites viewers to text in phone-camera photos of their worrying personal bits: cauliflower buttocks, willies like Twiglets. 'Keep those body parts coming,' she breezed. It wasn't Art, quite, but Hieronymus Bosch and William Hogarth would have been gleefully battling to be first onto their Nokias.